Question

I need to access a few HTML pages through a Python script, problem is that I need COOKIE functionality, therefore a simple urllib HTTP request won’t work.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

check out Mechanize. “Stateful programmatic web browsing in Python”.
It handles cookies automagically.

import mechanize

br = mechanize.Browser()
resp = br.open("http://www.mysitewithcookies.com/")
print resp.info()  # headers
print resp.read()  # content

mechanize also exposes the urllib2 API, with cookie handling enabled by default.